I thought that they were just OK back when they came out in the theater. Nevertheless, I saw each one three times in their day. These days, I avoid the originals, as I've got the Q2 fan edits of each of them, and they're actually watchable. The edits cut out almost an hour of cringe-worthy dialog, sub-par acting, and stupidity. There are other edits as well, such as reducing R2 and 3PO's roles to almost nothing, removing the voices from the battle droids, no midiclorians(!), and no Sidious appearances until Episode III. Some of the deleted scenes have been added as well. Pretty good stuff.

I haven't even seen episode 7 and rogue one, and I've heard that they aren't too bad... but the 'prequels' are so insanely awful that it has literally killed any fandom I once had for the series. And I loved star wars growing up. I'm 33, I watched the original trilogy 8 zillion times growing up on VHS. I can still quote most of the lines. The prequels? Man... that was destroying a franchise if I ever saw it.

FusekiGames wrote:I thought that they were just OK back when they came out in the theater. Nevertheless, I saw each one three times in their day. These days, I avoid the originals, as I've got the Q2 fan edits of each of them, and they're actually watchable. The edits cut out almost an hour of cringe-worthy dialog, sub-par acting, and stupidity. There are other edits as well, such as reducing R2 and 3PO's roles to almost nothing, removing the voices from the battle droids, no midiclorians(!), and no Sidious appearances until Episode III. Some of the deleted scenes have been added as well. Pretty good stuff.

I think there were some good stories in the prequels. However, the wooden acting in front of the blue screens is what did it in. Also, they probably should have skipped the events in Episode 1 and just concentrated on adult Anakin. More Grievous and Maul!

I think the plots were good for the prequels but the casting was horrific. Everyone blames Hayden Christensen for being bland, but the supporting cast didn't help at all. It takes two for there to be no chemistry and Natalie Portman I guess for some reason found Hayden Christensen repulsive, because their scenes together are awful. You get the real feeling Natalie Portman would never sleep with this guy. Also, Ewan Mcgregor was a terrible Obi Wan. He was just bland and completely uninteresting. It's weird because there were some great actors in the prequels, including Samuel L. Jackson of course. But they were all miscast terribly. I think they could've been viewed in a better light if the love story was more believable. But like I said, for some reason you could tell Natalie Portman wasn't into him.

Parts of the prequels are great - every scene with Palpatine, for instance. Unfortunately, it tried to demystify everything the first movie introduced. Compare Qui Jonn and his midichlorian reader to Obi Wan first describing the force in mystical religious language. It also retreads the same ground storywise. The comic relief fell flat, etc. If all Lucas ever did was the original trilogy, he would be amazing. That we don't appreciate the prequels 20 years later like we do the original trilogy really isn't that unusual.

I don't think they are bad movies, but they just don't have the originality and spark of the original.

Agree 100% This is probably the worst problem Lucas ran into when making the prequels. He wanted to explain everything that had no reason to be explained. I think the midichlorian thing is a good example of his overall problem. What that did is make "The Force" something only a certain bloodline could get you. Not hard work, focus, belief, etc. Nope. Just the right blood. And Luke's blood was half royalty.

Now it feels more meaningful. A royal bloodline that is actually better than normal bloodlines is needed to save the galaxy from the "threat" of a different race trying to set up *gasp* a trade federation! Now I feel like I'm cheering for the good guys. "Please someone get someone with special royal blood to save our slave-holding culture of racists from a trade war!"

Parts of the prequels are great - every scene with Palpatine, for instance. Unfortunately, it tried to demystify everything the first movie introduced. Compare Qui Jonn and his midichlorian reader to Obi Wan first describing the force in mystical religious language. It also retreads the same ground storywise. The comic relief fell flat, etc. If all Lucas ever did was the original trilogy, he would be amazing. That we don't appreciate the prequels 20 years later like we do the original trilogy really isn't that unusual.

I don't think they are bad movies, but they just don't have the originality and spark of the original.

Agree 100% This is probably the worst problem Lucas ran into when making the prequels. He wanted to explain everything that had no reason to be explained. I think the midichlorian thing is a good example of his overall problem. What that did is make "The Force" something only a certain bloodline could get you. Not hard work, focus, belief, etc. Nope. Just the right blood. And Luke's blood was half royalty.

Now it feels more meaningful. A royal bloodline that is actually better than normal bloodlines is needed to save the galaxy from the "threat" of a different race trying to set up *gasp* a trade federation! Now I feel like I'm cheering for the good guys. "Please someone get someone with special royal blood to save our slave-holding culture of racists from a trade war!"

I kinda liked that to be honest. If hard work, focus, belief, etc could make you a jedi, then really anyone could be a jedi, no? That doesn't make the jedi really special does it?

I never looked at it as a "royal bloodline" or anything.

I liked the prequels. The CGI has aged horribly though, but I recently watched the prequels with my kids and I still enjoy them.

They are as labored as they are incoherent, and their central figure is completely insufferable.

I was a kid when The Phantom Menace came out. I somehow missed it at the theater, but my parents bought the VHS to go with our copy of A New Hope. I can say damn near every line in A New Hope from the many times I watched it back then, but with The Phantom Menace, I eventually just fast-forwarded from the big fish to the podrace to the lightsaber fight because there's nothing else in that movie that I could possibly care about, then or now. It doesn't even work as a setup for the other two prequels, being set so senselessly far before them.

Attack of the Clones is basically two movies until the end. Anakin's is flat-out irredeemable, and while Obi-Wan's is fun to watch the first time around, it's impossible to not see how incredibly stupid every single detail of the "mystery" and his "investigation" is when you revisit it. That leaves the final act, where even that insipid factory sequence can't ruin the awesome land battle, which is the single time that the prequels live up to their epic aspirations.

The Revenge of the Sith is the least bad, mainly because Anakin seems almost human here instead of the Family Circus character that he was in the first movie or the unbelievable creep that he was in the second. It's still too cluttered and stilted to be actively good (Obi-Wan's detour with General Grievous is the biggest waste of time in the series), but I'll take its clunky melodrama over its predecessors' complete failure to articulate emotion at all.

What made the original trilogy good was its combination of urgency and levity - urgency being a consequence of emotional investment in the films' tension, levity being a simple awareness of the lightweight blockbuster fun that it was. With the prequels, there's practically none of the first (even if a single actor besides Liam Neeson and Ewan MacGregor managed to sell the awful dialogue enough to be sympathetic, the films practically go out of their way to downplay the tension that should drive their scenes), and the second is sucked out and segregated into jarring spurts of "comic relief" against the deadly serious grandiosity that is left as the films' true character.

People can harp on the prequels all they want for the midichlorians or the unexplained new technology or any number of discontinuities with the originals, but that's just beating around the bush without addressing how bad they actually are on their own terms as movies. George Lucas shouldn't be faulted for aiming high in trying to make a different, more ambitious kind of movie with the prequels, especially after so many years. He should be faulted for making it terribly.

Atarifever wrote:They're slow and the dialogue is more cringe-worthy every time. A lot of apologists online say "everyone loved them at first, then it got cool to hate them." That's half true. People didn't mind them at first.

I'm not so sure about even that -- I still remember the look of stunned horror on my friends' faces when they came back from seeing The Phantom Menace at the local movie theater. They'd been so excited -- and BTW these were regular dudes, not some sort of pasty basement-dwelling nerd stereotypes -- and afterwards, they were so disappointed. They weren't ranting or angry, just shocked at how bad it was and how empty the whole experience felt.

Ever read the first draft of Star Wars. I haven't, but I have read a summary. It was just as ploddiling and episodic as Phantom Menace, but Lucas loved it. He only cut it down because he knew he wouldn't get the resources needed to make it reality. Maybe that's why the prequels are worse than the originals; George finally had everything he needed to do it "right."